


The Next Few Days

by scorched_wings



Category: The Binding - Bridget Collins
Genre: Camping, Canon Compliant, Caring, Epilogue, First Love, Love, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Book, Trauma, Young Love, fleeing, patience - Freeform, post-remembering, relearning, travelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23866081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorched_wings/pseuds/scorched_wings
Summary: 'It is a relief, too, to relearn Emmett like this, among landscapes truly new to both of them, unlayered by memory.'Emmett and Lucian make their journey away from Castleford on foot. Lucian grapples with his new memories and two overlapping pasts, and Emmett responds with quiet patience. Set just after the end of the novel.
Relationships: Lucian Darnay/Emmett Farmer
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46





	The Next Few Days

Over the next few days Lucian finds himself oddly grateful for the need to flee. His aching calves and bramble-nicked arms help hold him in the present, his feet thudding firmly on solid earth. He can find comfort even in his smoke-raw lungs, proving the recent past real. He lives step by step, day by day, and the forward movement helps him escape being crushed and rent at once by the co-presence of newness and history. 

It is a relief, too, to relearn Emmett like this, among landscapes truly new to both of them, unlayered by memory. At one point they emerge from dense woodland to find themselves on the edge of a steep hill, thick tufts of grass seeming to smooth away into green glass below. A shining river runs like a crack through the deep bowl, and, squinting against the sun, Lucian can just make out hills even greater than this in the distance. He can’t help but grin to see Emmett’s usual patient knowing wiped off his face as he drinks in this new vista.

In reality, Emmett’s patience has been a godsend, though. The layering of his two pasts still makes Lucian nauseous. He can’t imagine how Emmett went through this alone. But then he’d always known the boy was stronger than him. The grey fog is gone, and the truths left exposed are raw and blinding. Emmett understands, is content to march for hours in silence without eye contact, starting by relearning, relishing, the sound of each other’s footsteps. Emmett’s tread is somehow both quieter and less self conscious than Lucian’s. 

Touch is difficult, sex even more so. Lucian falls through the gaps between what his brain and body remembered, what they remember now. The night in the binder’s house haunts him, fights with his new knowledge, his body trying to pull him through as it did that night. It is a brick laid without regard for existing foundations, and future building will always have to accommodate the flaw. He can’t quite name, even to himself, that it has damaged his trust, but he knows Emmett can feel it, can see it in his eyes, and Lucian finds he feels oddly guilty about that. For now, he tends to the wounds on his hand himself, clumsily, trying to ignore Emmett’s tense need to tend to him, especially as he stumbles over retying his makeshift bandages. He hates that the return of his memory hasn’t allowed a leap back to the point it was taken. He can’t believe how light he felt that summer.

If Emmett feels guilty he hasn’t said, but with this, too, his patience is matchless. He will sit for hours, arm laid out, allowing Lucian to trace, deliberately, each contour of his skin, round the bones of his wrist, the wrinkles of his knuckles, disturbing the gently curling hair on the outside of his forearm, and brushing the silky, ticklish skin on the inside. Lucian finds moments of peace in successfully predicting when he will laugh and squirm. His old, newfound happiness is a quiet ache he feels compelled to lean in to.

Lucian knows they are travelling more slowly than Emmett would like, although of course he would never say. Lucian sleeps for hours and hours, his dreams vivid and stinging. Emmett grips his good hand tightly when he wakes, still lost to the past, and guides it gently to the frayed edge of his collar and his ever rougher stubble to ground him. Ever the binder, Emmett suggests the dreams are part of his brain’s effort to assimilate his two lives. Though they spend much of each day walking, a horseman from Castleford could still easily catch them. But, lost as they are themselves, how could anyone find them? They are careful to bury the ashes of their fires and the bones of the few creatures they’ve managed to catch with their limited weaponry. 

They don’t discuss where they’re going. Even when, only half-visible to each other in flickering firelight, they find moments where they can talk freely about the past, neither of them mentions the future. Lucian assumes Emmett doesn’t have a plan. That his plan seems to have begun and ended with having him back makes Lucian feel more calm than frightened.

**Author's Note:**

> I was captivated by this novel, and have loved to see the world and these characters' experiences expanded upon in the few fanfics that are already on here. Would love to know what you think of this one.


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